It may not be obvious to many any longer, but it is a fact that the impact of the UK’s citizens does extend a little way beyond our local carbon dioxide emissions. Regular readers will know that one of my bugbears is the way our lifestyles can (so far) be propped up by the “non-existent” carbon dioxide emissions of our external suppliers. Anyway, you will be relieved to hear, this note isn’t about that.

There are forms of real pollution, with localised effects, that have been all but swept aside from the public conversation. The important point on many of these is that local actions produce local benefits, which is the opposite situation for the one quite innocuous compound with which our policy makers are obsessed. Reduce (say) sewage entering watercourses: see an immediate and proximal benefit. Some sources of pollution have been dealt with territorially in the UK (sulphur dioxide is a good example: anyone remember the acid rain scare that preceded “teh climate crisis”?).

I have a book on air pollution and plant life – yes, it’s out of date, but its mentions of carbon dioxide note that increases in the goblin gas will: reduce transpiration, increase photosynthesis, increase growth rates, increase biomass and crop yield, increase water use efficiency and increase leaf area index (LAI: a measure of how green Earth is). C4 plants can expect to show 22% higher yields under 700 ppm CO₂, and C3 plants 41%. It’s quite disappointing that this fodder for sceptics is kept firmly away from public discourse. Some facts are harmful. To the cause, at least.

It was quite warm yesterday, and the sun was incredibly strong – as strong, I thought, as I had felt it in the UK. It got me wondering whether the quantity of sunlight hitting the ground is higher now than, oh, say 1976. Well, the answer is almost certainly yes; more on which another day. But while searching for data on aerosol concentration I stumbled upon a different dataset, which was “released quietly under cover of darkness,” or whatever it is the alarmists say when what they consider adverse news for the UK re “teh climate crisis” is whispered, rather than trumpeted.

It was a dataset called,

Material footprint, UK, 1990 to 2023

…which was released, quietly, et cetera, on 8^th May 2026. Here we have the UK’s demands on resources, including but not limited to our insatiable demand for (imported) carbon dioxide emissions. The material footprint of the UK is divided into 4 buckets in this dataset, of which one is fossil fuels. The others are biomass, metal ores, and non-metallic minerals. Biomass is food, wood, etc; metal ores – well, they’re metal ores, and non-metallic minerals are things like aggregates and limestone. Yes, I know, limestone does contain metal, but the AI helpfully informs me that it does not go into the metal ores bucket, because it is not mined to extract calcium, whereas bauxite is mined to extract aluminium.

Anyway, which of these, which of the different measures of the UK’s impact on the world, has gone up, which has gone down, and which stayed the same? I’ll put a picture in here, to give you a second or two to think about it.

Well, the answer is, biomass has not changed at all. Mostly because we still eat, even if we now eat less; but there are more of us. Metal ores have gone up from 50 million tonnes in 1990 to 120 million tonnes in 2023; I’m sure I don’t need to spell out exactly why. The use of non-metallic minerals was 575 million tonnes last year, up from 320 million tonnes in 1990. And as for fossil fuels, it’s down from 330 million tonnes in 1990 to 225 million tonnes in 2023, a drop of perhaps 1/3. Note though that the value for 1996 was 241 million tonnes – so the drop from 1996 to 2023 is more like 7%, on these numbers.

We don’t produce any of our metals: the ONS spreadsheet helpfully breaks out the source countries, and country groups. The UK’s column for metal ores is uniformly filled with one word: [low]. The largest country group is “rest of the world”: i.e. countries ex the OECD, whose controls on pollution are unlikely to be quite as robust as the ones we nominally insist on here (I say nominally because of the disgraceful pollution of our rivers by sewage, not because of their pollution by mine tailings).

The consequences of our increasing consumption are out of sight, and out of mind. What pollution occurs in our name in far-flung places need not concern us, right? The only important thing is local emissions of carbon dioxide.

The featured image comes from Pexels, but if you go and look at the Humber port on Google Earth, at about 53.655 N 0.24 W, you’ll see something very similar, but a bit more blurry.